Tuesday, May 17, 2011

You Knew This Was Coming

Unable to come up with the 73-hundred-plus votes needed to turn around the race for State Supreme Court, Joanne Kloppenberg is now trying to discredit the entire election process. Kloppenberg (or someone with a greater grasp on the English language) has written an op-ed piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel today ostensibly to defend her decision to request the recount--which the JS has called into question recently.

But rather than make reasoned arguments for having all 72 counties take on the cost of recounting the more than two million ballots cast last month (and there were some), Kloppenberg uses the opinion piece to instead lay the groundwork for the inevitable legal challenges that will be filed in an effort to delay and discredit the results of the election.

Among the allegations raised by Kloppenberg are ballots sitting outside of their bags in a clerk's office, holes in ballot bags that were big enough for a hand to fit in and ballots left in voting machines--all of which, Kloppenberg believes, call into question the accuracy of the recount totals. And of course, the most egregious of these "anomolies" took place in Waukesha County.

Now it should be noted, the ballots just sitting out in the clerk's office took place in Dane County--which almost single-handedly elected Kloppenberg to the Supreme Court with an eyebrow-raising majority and turnout--so no legal challenge will ever be filed against those results. Better to just put an "anonymous" allegation out there to get people fired up.

As for the "hole-y" ballot bags--let's actually play out the allegation that Kloppenberg is raising there. Let's say someone did tear a hole in the bag big enough to get a hand in--the ballot sheets would still need to be folded or mutilated to get them out of a hole that size. Do we have folded ballots in those bags? And how did the "tamperer" know what he or she would be pulling out? Did that person manage to find only Kloppenberg ballots and replace them with Prosser ballots? And did that person take the time to fill out the rest of the ballot exactly like the original voter did--so that the numbers in all of the other races still turned out the same? And apparently, everyone who did the ballot switching was in communications with each other to know exactly how many "phony" ballots to slip in the bags so as not to skew the numbers so much as to arouse suspicion.

So let's wrap up the recount and live with the final numbers. If Joanne Kloppenberg wants some reassurance that the numbers are accurate she should listen back to the comments of her fellow Democrats during Legislative debate on the Voter ID bill--that voter fraud is only a figment of Republicanss imaginations meant to disenfranchise the people who usually vote against them.